Opera Mad in Camelot: Still Seeking the Next Kennedy

A year or so ago, I was standing in line in a parking lot by the sea. The first wave of a two-day storm had washed through that afternoon. The asphalt shone under the streetlights as brightly as the ocean shone in the wavery, inconstant light of the moon behind the rushing clouds. As we got closer to the white library building, ablaze itself in television lights, various undifferentiated Kennedys of the third generation after the New Frontier came wandering out to greet the people waiting in line to pay their respects to the last Kennedy of that now distant and perpetually tumultuous period. It was past midnight before we wound our way through the parking lots, down the hallways of the library, and through the room past the closed casket of Senator Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. The storm broke again, fiercer still, the next morning.

The cool cats 'n' kittens of the elite press corps — Print and Television regiments, but especially the latter — spent the next few days praising the deceased's ability to "get things done," and to "reach across the aisle," and to "practice the art of the possible." There was much moaning and wailing and rending of upholstery in the Green Room about the current state of our politics, as though the art of governing in a democratic republic could be summed up in the ability to get along with such a consummate faker as Orrin Hatch. Lost, except in occasional euphemism, was the fact that, at the time Kennedy died, one party had determined that it was good politics that very little get done, national interest and the results of the previous two national elections be damned; that reaching across the aisle now meant extending your hand into a gibbering monkeyhouse, and that there was no art of the possible, well, possible, as long as one side determines that richly empowered nonsense is the key to political success in a country too numb to act in its own self-interest. Lost, except in occasional euphemism, was the fact that thousands of people don't wait four hours in the soggy middle of a storm-fresh night to celebrate someone's unique gift for compromise. What was needed at the time of Ted Kennedy's death was not the man who got suckered by George Bush and his No Child Left Behind confidence game, but the man who stood and spoke, loudly and uncompromisingly, in order to keep a bitter Victorian yahoo like Robert Bork off the Supreme Court.

The former could be replaced, and has been, most notably by a president whose official crest ought to be half-a-loaf of bread, and who now finds himself battling the forces not only of an intractable political opposition, but also the undeniable power of clear and uncompromising public bullshit. It is the latter Teddy that this president needed the most but, looking around at his putative allies within his own party, and assuming that the president is unwilling or unable to do it himself, there was nobody willing or able to step into the role. While it was unquestionably surprising that Kennedy was replaced in the Senate by a stealth Republican named Scott Brown, it is altogether shocking that he has yet to be replaced within his own party by someone willing to be the obstreperous lefty voice to counter an increasingly shrill and increasingly manic Republican Right.

It's not Harry Reid, the leader of the alleged Democratic majority in the Senate, who is at present running neck and neck back home with a lunatic named Sharron Angle. Angle believes that Social Security is a violation of the First Commandment and that black football uniforms are the tools of Satan. (That may explain the Oakland Raiders, since Al Davis and Satan went to high school together.) In a sane political order, Angle would be the woman people don't want to sit next to at city council meetings, leaving her to staple her opinions to telephone poles around City Hall. Meanwhile, Reid's been in a crouch for months, most recently over the raving nonsense surrounding a proposed Islamic cultural center in lower Manhattan. At this point, it is entirely possible that Harry Reid could be mugged via e-mail. Russ Feingold's too eccentric, and, anyway, he's tied up in a tough re-election fight, too, against a guy who believes that global-warming is the natural order of things. Some people see things as they are and say "Why?" These people see things that never were and say, "Why, yes." They also hear voices, speak in tongues, see Jesus in grilled-cheese sandwiches and Churchill in a doughy fraud like Newt Gingrich. And they probably will win this fall.

Consider: just this year, the Senate found itself unable to act on extending unemployment insurance during a time when somewhere north of 17 percent of the country was out of work. In other words, allegedly sentient politicians found themselves unable to appreciate the political value of giving away money. And the Senate also found itself unable to act on the issue of extending health care benefits to the people who got sick working on the pile of rubble that once was the World Trade Center. In other words, we can't build a Muslim culinary school on this "sacred ground," and, if you're coughing up your lungs because you spent weeks pulling body parts out of the "sacred ground," you're as shit out of luck as the Muslims are, pal. Free money and helping the heroes of Ground Zero now no longer have viable enough political constituencies in the Congress to get themselves passed. And these are the politics on the verge of success.

And this is the manner of opposition to which liberalism can find no answer — a Ground Zero mosque that is neither a mosque nor a culinary school nor at Ground Zero. Meanwhile, nobody can seem to make a good campaign issue out of the fact that, for the first time ever, a law was passed that embraced at least in principle Ted Kennedy's lifelong dream of universal health insurance. It was a weak and sickly stab at it, but it was a political triumph nonetheless. Why is this administration not getting credit for all it's done, wonder the president's most avid supporters. It's because there's nobody out there — including the president, apparently — who can connect these accomplishments in a coherent narrative in such a way as to command the respect of a public conditioned to believe that universal health insurance means that Stalin will rise from his grave in order to march your white-haired granny into hers. That's what's never been replaced since we all stood in line by the sea, under the shattered light of a moon as the clouds raced in front of it ahead of the storm.

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